Long time I listened my mp3's through my SB on my home-receiver. I used the analoge ouputs and was excited! It works!
Later I bought an digital-coax cable and connected it between the digital out and in of my amplifier. It worked too! Yes, and I found out that the soundstage was improved.
Then I bought an Behringer Ultramatch PRO SRC2496 wich converted the signal to 24 bits/96Khz and for me (the rest of my family decided there was not) there was again a little improvement.
Experimenting with cables I bought an optical link (Toslink) for connecting the SB to the converter instead of the coaxial link and thought, that now there was no electrical contact between SB and rest of my hifi-installation, the sound would be different (my family went for shopping, no more interested...). Well, the sound was, for me, again a bit better.
So, there I was, switching cables, testing the same track over and over again till I got an idea....

What when I would replace the mp3-decoder with the one I used to encode my libarary (lame 3.96)? Maybe it could deal too with the gaps I heared listening to my life-albums and I was curious to what would happen to the 'sound' again (my wife told me I went crazy).

So after using this forum for the info I put lame.exe in the BIN directory and changed the convert.conf file like this:

mp3 aif squeezebox *
[lame] --decode -t --silent -x $FILE$ -

I restarted my slimserver-service and there it was! I could choose for the decoding via lame, sending the bits and bytes to my SB wich would simple converted them to the digital output (Toslink).

Will my wife be right am I getting crazy? I still hear an improvement or is it rather wishfull thinking? I think I do hear a better sound by converting via lame then via the build-in decoder from the SB. The lower tones are more straight, soundstage is widened whereas the SB makes the sound somewhat blurred, still good but comparing to the lame-used decoder (mpg1213 or something).

Maybe you (mp3-listeners) can help me check if I am right or indeed getting crazy (look out for your home-mates..;-)). I am curious at what your findings are.

Thanks,

quick_snack
(must go using flac to avoid all this.....)